Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 377)

Trigger Happy
379
player’s ability to switch control between several
soldiers with different mission duties enhances the
demands of strategic timing and also, since the
environment may be seen from several different
viewpoints in rapid succession, increases the sense of
that environment’s solid existence. Games such as
Omikron: The Nomad Soul or Eden, meanwhile, create
ever more stunning Blade Runner and Judge Dredd–
style cityscapes whose furniture and surfaces are
increasingly interactive in new symbolic ways.
Currently, the third-person game—for instance
Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid or Zelda 64—has the
edge over the first-person game such as Quake III,
which shows a perspectival viewpoint as if you were
actually in the digital environment. Although it might
initially look as if the latter genre should be the more
involving, since the illusion is that you are really there,
it is almost always less symbolically rich. This
limitation derives directly, in fact, from the artificially
narrow view angle in such games, and also from the
observation that without stereoscopic vision (our two
eyes receiving slightly different images in real life) it is
much harder to judge depth. Therefore, symbolic
interoperation through space is severely limited.